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NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is the leading grassroots pro-choice advocacy organization in Washington state, and we believe that every woman should be able to make personal decisions about the full range of reproductive health options. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington works to protect every woman’s right to access the full range of reproductive health options, including preventing unintended pregnancy, bearing healthy children, and choosing legal abortion. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is the state affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

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Monday Motivation: Teen Pregnancy? It’s “Moral Destiny”!

Today in PhotoShop abuse. Also, maybe the chain-link fencing is a hint that this is not exactly a current photo?

Colorado’s “startling success,” as the New York Times put it, in reducing unwanted pregnancies among teenagers and low-income women is giving the birth control police the vapors. That’s understandable: A 40 percent reduction in teen birth rates and a 46 percent reduction in the abortion rate should be cause for widespread panic among those who make their living slut-shaming women and trying to restrict alternatives to their utterly disproven alternative, abstinence for everybody. According to the Times, the Colorado program is now in jeopardy because of opposition from anti-choice legislators, who scrapped funding for the program this year. Sexually active teens could theoretically get the same coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but only with their parents’ permission.

One of the arguments Republicans in the state legislature made against funding the program was, according to the Guardian, that IUDs cause abortions–a thoroughly discredited notion that has zero currency outside the most extreme factions of the anti-choice movement.

Here in Seattle, where a dozen schools provide birth control, including long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) like IUDs, no-judgment contraception is generally viewed as the most effective way to reduce teen pregnancy. For the anti-choicers at the Libertarian Republic, though, giving sexually active teens access to birth control represents the worst kind of government interference: Meddling in parents’ ability to control the sex lives of their teenage children. (Because that always turns out well).

Beyond raising the lurid specter of prepubescent children having sex, the best argument the concern trolls at the LibRepub can make against giving teens birth control is that IUDs are dangerous (nope) and that they’re “difficult” to use with condoms (huh?)

In a similar vein, the Patriot Post calls access to birth control without parental consent “utterly twisted,” and “quite simply the imposition of government-sanctioned pro-birth control, pro-abortion ideology on parents who have been rendered powerless to make informed health choices or shape the moral destiny of their own children.” Presumably, that “moral destiny” includes teen pregnancy and parenthood.

Finally, in honor of Independence Day, LifeNews would like you to know that the Fourth of July represents freedom for everyone except for “literally … assaulted” “unborn babies,” and that if Hillary Clinton if Hillary Clinton is elected, “the abortion industry will have a best friend in the White House again!” Couldn’t come soon enough.